A body of research is developing that finds teachers with more teaching experience increase student growth on achievement tests more than novice teachers (Kini and Podolsky 2016; Ladd and Sorensen 2017). Clearly, new teachers can be great and more than mere experience is required for excellence, but on average, research finds a positive relationship between years of experience and student outcomes of interest. Based on data in California from 2012-13 through 2018-19, this analysis concludes that teacher experience continues to be inequitably distributed, with hyper-segregated schools with the highest proportions of students of color having the highest proportions of novice teachers.

National research finds that the most inexperienced teachers are clustered in schools with the most marginalized students, with racialized minority students more likely to employ “green” teachers (Knight 2019). One understanding of equitable distribution of school resources suggests that the most marginalized students would receive the most resources to equalized opportunity. Opportunity gaps across race, however, exist in several types of school resources (Carter and Welner 2013). Schools with the most racially marginalized student populations that have teachers with the most experience is one such school resource distribution worth continued investigation. Higher concentrations of the least experienced teachers in racially marginalized schools is particularly suspect.

Several policies have attempted to address the inequitable distribution of experience, including the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies which have changed in recent years (Knight 2019). This fact sheet reports the distribution of teacher experience across segregated schools in California to promote understanding of recent trends. The analysis addresses the following question: Are higher concentrations of inexperienced teachers most frequently employed in schools with higher concentrations of marginalized students of color?



Figure 1: Percent of Teachers with 2 or Fewer Years of Experience, By Student Segregation (2012-13 to 2018-19)


Teaching experience varied somewhat with student segregation (Figure 1). In all 7 years analyzed, majority white schools had fewer novice teachers than schools with higher proportions of racially marginalized students. In particular, schools with a student composition that was majority non-white or greater had a higher proportion of novice teachers than schools that were majority white or majority white plus Asian. This teacher experience gap widened from approximately 1 percentage point to 2 percentage points between 2012-13 and 2018-19.

The size of this gap may become practically significant when considering that the effects of teacher (in)experience can add up over 12+ years of schooling. The observed relationship between teacher experience and school segregation may need to be reversed to begin to close, instead of potentially widen, racialized achievement gaps. Desegregating schools could also decrease racialized exposure to novice teachers.



Table 1: California Schools with the Highest Proportion of Novice Teachers (2018-19)

The 100 schools (or slightly more due to ties) with the highest proportion of teachers with 2 or fewer years of experience had greater than 57% novice teachers (Table 1). There were 161 schools in 2018-19 where the majority of teachers had 2 or fewer years of teaching experience. These schools varied in terms of student segregation, with some schools without white students to as high as 76.9% white. At the other end of the experience distribution, there were 1,712 schools where all teachers had greater than 2 years of experience.



Robustness Checks: Alternative Measurements of Experience

The finding that schools with the highest proportions of racially marginalized students have the least experience teachers could be an artifact of how we measured teacher experience. Additionally, because some recent reviews of research find that additional teaching experience is associated with student gains into teachers’ second and even third decade (e.g., Kini and Podolsky 2016), just looking at the proportion of new teachers may not usefully describe the extent of teacher experience gaps. Several alternative measures were created to see if the central finding was robust to alternative measures of teaching experience. Alternative measurements of teacher experience showed similar trends.

To expand the analysis presented in Table 1 above, the proportion of teachers with 1 and 3 years of experience was substituted for the proportion of teachers with 2 or fewer years experience.. The results were similar: majority white and majority white plus Asian schools had lower proportions of novice teachers than majority non-white, 90-100% non-white, and 99-100% non-white schools. In both alternative measurements, the gap began to widen in 2013-14. When using the proportion of teachers with 3 or fewer years of experience, the experience gap between majority white and majority non-white was approx. 3 percentage points in 2018-19.



Figure 2: Novice Teachers and Student Racial Composition (2018-19)

Average years of teaching experience was negatively correlated with African American and Hispanic student enrollment and positively correlated with white and Asian enrollment (Figure 2). The relationship was strongest with black enrollment and rather weak for the other racialized groups. Pooling the data from 2012-13 to 2018-19 created similar results.



Discussion

This analysis identified persistent gaps in teacher experience that are associated with student racial segregation. With a growing body of research concluding that teacher experience improves school success, teacher experience gaps across segregated schools constitutes part of an ongoing opportunity gap in California. Efforts to address the distribution of teacher experience have been made in recent decades, yet the trends observed in this analysis suggest different approaches are required to improve opportunities to learn for racialized marginalized children in California. Finally, the evidence presented in this report is adds to a significant body of research concluding that equal educational opportunity is thwarted by school segregation. Dealing with school segregation and the distribution of teacher experience simultaneously may produce significant benefits.

References

Carter, Prudence L, and Kevin G Welner. 2013. Closing the Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance. Oxford University Press.
Kini, Tara, and Anne Podolsky. 2016. “Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research.” Learning Policy Institute.
Knight, David S. 2019. “Are School Districts Allocating Resources Equitably? The Every Student Succeeds Act, Teacher Experience Gaps, and Equitable Resource Allocation.” Educational Policy 33 (4): 615–49.
Ladd, Helen F, and Lucy C Sorensen. 2017. “Returns to Teacher Experience: Student Achievement and Motivation in Middle School.” Education Finance and Policy 12 (2): 241–79.

Appendix: Data and Measures

Data come from publicly available staff files provided by the California Department of Education (CDE). The analysis covers all school years available: 2012-13 to 2018-19.

The following rules were applied to prepare the data for analysis:

The final analytic data set included an average of 8,856 schools per year.

Measure of Experience

We measure teacher experience by calculating the proportion within each school of teachers with 2 or fewer years of teaching experience. That is, the proportion of schools’ teachers in their first or second year of teaching. Experience, as measured by the CDE, includes prior teaching experience in any school, including outside of California. Experience substitute teaching or classified staff service is not included. A teacher in their first year of employment is categorized by CDE as having 1 year of experience.

The educational returns to additional years of experience are likely greatest in the first few years of teaching (Kini and Podolsky 2016), so teachers with a “few years under their belts” are more likely to promote academic growth than new teachers.

Measures of Student Segregation

To examine teacher experience gaps across different types of segregated schools, schools were grouped into one or more of the following categories: majority white, majority white and Asian, majority non-white, 90-100% non-white, and 99-100% non-white. Majority white and Asian included Filipino. Non-white was defined as a sum of all the racial groups provided by CDE other than white (i.e., Hispanic, African American, Asian, Filipino, Pacific Islander, and Two or More races).